This invention relates to telephony, and has particular relation to looking up and calling telephone numbers which have been stored in a telephone or associated device.
A telephone may store a reasonably large number of numbers. The telephone""s user may be away from a paper telephone book, or even a personal address book. This is particularly true for wireless telephones. This feature prevents the number from being lost or forgotten.
Conventionally, each number is associated with the name of the person to be called. These names are listed in some convenient order, generally alphabetical. The telephone user scrolls through the names, selects the one he wants, and presses the send button. It is unnecessary to manually enter the exact number on the keypad. Having the number built into the telephone (or some associated device, such as a Personal Digital Assistant) thus makes it faster to call the number as well as making the number resistant to being lost or forgotten.
Applicants have noted that the very popularity of this feature has become its downfall. It is relatively cheap and convenient to place quite a lot of memory on the telephone, which allows quite a long list of numbers to be stored in the telephone. This great length makes it inconvenient for the user to scroll through the entire list.
Applicants have therefore reversed the conventional technology. Applicants do not attempt to avoid manual use of the keypad. Instead, Applicants exploit such manual use to reduce the length of the list, and use scrolling on the reduced list. Indeed, the list is often reduced to a single entry, thereby allowing scrolling to be entirely avoided.
As each digit of the phone number is entered, the resultant partially entered phone number is compared with the numbers. A display shows only those numbers which match (in some sense) the partially entered number. When the desired number is shown (perhaps with the aid of some additional scrolling), the user selects it, and the number is called.